Collection Success Stories in the Contact Center: Part 2

Maintaining contact center compliance in the debt collection industry is a difficult task with compliance to state-by-state regulatory laws and agent retention being two of the biggest. One error by an agent can cost you thousands of dollars in fines and cost you the time investment in training your agent. Many contact centers are relying on speech analytics software to track and analyze 100% of customer conversations and identify areas in regards to reduce risk and adhere to compliance.

Read on to learn how three debt collection companies are able to utilize speech analytics to improve compliance and keep agents highly engaged.

Frontline Asset Strategies (FAST)

Frontline Asset Strategies is a full-service contact center that provides customer service along with collections services to various industries including automotive, banking, education, and telecommunications. Their core values are to conduct ethical business practices while providing outstanding service. In an effort to meet changing requirements and customer demands, they implemented CallMiner Eureka Interaction Analytics.

By utilizing interaction analytics, FAST was able to automate their call monitoring to record and score 100% of calls. With the ability to build a customized call scoring system, FAST was able to use the techniques from their manual process in the automated system. Once they implemented speech analytics, they were able to “increase compliance scores to nearly 98% in just 6 months and eliminate language that could result in penalties for the business.”

Founded in 2009, Delta Outsource Group provides collection and receivable management programs. Just like FAST, prior to implementing interaction analytics, the company relied on manual call scoring and quality assurance. Because they were only able to review a handful of calls, there were many holes in being able to effectively identify compliance issues among agents and put them at risk for serious fines due to lack of compliance.

From day one of implementing interaction analytics, Delta was able to identify numerous call issues including potential FDCPA violations, abusive language, and threats of legal action. In addition, they identified areas costing the company profits including the length of call and length of silence during the call. To improve compliance, Delta built a customized scorecard that included both pre-defined categories and new categories to score agents on. They then used this information to personalize training and coaching to eliminate areas of compliance concern.

Delta also integrated the call scores to their agent incentive program. This helped to encourage buy-in from agents who are often the toughest to get onboard with new technology. By showing them how the new program would give an objective view of their performance as a whole instead of just a portion, agents were happier with the new system.

Stoneleigh Recovery Associates was founded in 2007 as a credit card debt collection agency. Their mission is to be a leader in performance and customer service by using state-of-the-art technology. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau made updates to their debt collection regulations, Stoneleigh found them in need of better technology to keep their biggest customer satisfied and remain compliant.

Just like the previous two case studies, prior to interaction analytics, Stoneleigh relied on manual audits of agent conversations. Their QA manager would only be able to listen to a handful of calls per agent each month and didn’t have a 360-degree view of compliance with such a small sample.

By implementing CallMiner, Stoneleigh was able to build a customized scorecard starting small in the beginning so agents could focus on improving. They decided to plot scores on a graph to show the overall performance as well as give agents a way to compare personal performance to the average. By using the scores to create personalized coaching and training, Stoneleigh was able to help agents identify their weaknesses and teach them how to perform better on future calls.